Afterwards
by Boho Bless
Summary: Do the patients and patients' relatives ever think about House after they leave the hospital? Do they think about what a jerk he was, or do they remember him fondly? If a man saves a life, does that make him a good man? S1 characters think about House.


AFTERWARDS

LUKE

"Nice kid."

You weren't supposed to hear that. You were supposed to be scuttling down to the canteen to fetch House a sandwich. Translation: to keep you out of the way while House and his team of patronising morons tried to figure out what was wrong with your mom. Like, you hadn't been looking after her better than her doctors all those years.

You remember that moment, the moment you thought, "God, he's just like all the other doctors, all those other arrogant bastards," that moment he dismissed you with ten dollars and a sandwich order.

"Nice kid". You thought about those words, those patronising words, during those weeks you spent in foster care. You thought about the way he tricked you (and how stupid was that, falling for the oldest con in the book?); the way he got you to tell him your age. You hated him for that. You hated yourself for that. You hated yourself for letting him know you were just a kid. Just a nice kid.

And now you are just a kid again. You've got your mom back, and God, is she back with a vengeance. Nothing escapes her. Your hair needs cutting, have you finished your homework, what about your college applications? As if you hadn't been her parent for the last few years.

You think about the moment House sent you off to buy a sandwich. And then you think again. You remember his hands. You remember his hands holding your book, the book, THE book, where you'd written down everything about your mom's sickness – her symptoms, her treatments, her drugs. You think about his hands taking that book from you and holding it, feeling it, weighing it; treating it with respect. "Got your case notes, doctor," he said, half-teasing – but only half. You think about him reading it and learning from it. He was a bastard. He sent you into foster care. But he held your book like he respected it, like he respected you. He held your book like it actually held the answer to the riddle.

"Nice kid." Maybe it wasn't so patronising after all.

CARLY

He saved your life. He lied to save your life. He risked his career to save your life. Why would he do that?

You've heard all the jokes since you got back to work. You overhear the laughter in the restroom, the corridors, waiting for an elevator. You hear people tell each other about how the doctors decided you needed a new heart. "You mean, she needed a heart. Period."

Very droll, very funny.

He lied to get you that heart.

You understand lying. You've lied to get deals. There was no Asia, no plans for expansion there, never was. You lied about it in that meeting that you'll never forget, the one with the pain and the paralysis and the panic. Bullshitting – that's how you think of it. But it's just another word for lying. You did it because you could, because it worked, because it brought in the deals and brought in the money – and simply for the thrill of it. You would spin those stories and people believed you. _Men _believed you; fat men in grey suits sitting round the boardroom table, fat men in grey suits who got a secret kick out of you being in control.

But why did he lie? Why did _he_ lie? Dr House, the brilliant diagnostician. You checked him out. You know as much about him as you can, as much about him as he has ever let appear on the internet. You know he suffered an infarction; you know what an infarction is. You know that he understands pain beyond words; you know he understands the pain you felt. It must have been close to home for him. And yet they screwed up. His team screwed up. They X-rayed the wrong leg. There were different treatments, wrong diagnoses. They thought you had cancer.

Cancer killed your mother. You had to cope with it; you had to _try _to cope with it. But it was the first thing in your life that you couldn't cope with, the first thing that was out of your control. You learned everything you could about the disease. You did your research. You were just a college student then but you took time out. You cared for your mother and you made yourself the world expert on her disease. You found out all the facts – names and treatments; research projects, new drugs, new theories, new hope. And none of it worked. The cancer was out of control. It raged through her body, eating her alive. You couldn't control it.

House guessed. He saw it. He worked it out. He found the cuts on your legs. Were those exactly what he expected to see when he lifted your gown? He found your Ipecac. Did he know? Did he understand? Is that why he lied for you?

A lot of people think self-harm is self-hate. You know different. You know it's about control. The coolness of taking a blade and deciding, "Here, I will place a cut. Here, I will hurt myself. Now, here, now, I have decided to bleed and sting." Food, too. "This I will eat. This I won't eat. This I will throw up." Every pound you put on or lost, it was your decision, your control.

And he saw that. He blazed into your room and he saw. Those blue eyes, sharp like a blade, saw everything. He saw you curled up ready to die. He forced you to take control. "I want to know what's right," he said. He gave you control over your own life or death. He made you answer. "I want you to tell me that your life is important to you," he said, "because I don't know." He made you decide if he should lie for you. He made you take that responsibility. And all you could do was clutch his arm and plead. "I don't want to die. I don't."

You're in therapy now for the eating disorder, and it's helping. You can't risk this heart, this heart he risked his career to give you. You're a little heavier now. There's more flesh on your bones, a little less sharpness about your face. You think there's a little less sharpness about the way you do your job, too. You're a few steps off the pace. You're alive and healthy, but you're not flying like you used to fly, flying for the thrill of it, lying for the thrill of it; giving fat men in grey suits the secret thrill of you controlling them. You're – well, happy's not a word in your vocabulary. You're okay. You're alive. You're grateful, you suppose, to a man in pain whose blue eyes saw right through you. X-ray vision.

You still cut yourself, and you think of him when you do it. You take the razor blade, and run your hand along your scarred inner thigh, and you find the place to make the incision. Just one at a time, these days. One sharp pain, one more scar to carry you through the next few days. And every time you feel that pain you see him, hear him, shouting at you. Prodding you, needling you, making you respond. You were ready to die but he yanked you back, gave you back your control; gave you back your life.

House didn't lose his job. You checked. He's still there, still at PPTH, still with the same team. You wonder who else he's helped since you, what other risks he's taken, what other lives he's saved.

KEITH'S DAD

When you flex your fist in cold weather you can still feel the ache where it hit his jaw. You rammed your fist into his face, into that stupid, rubbery, arrogant, would-not-shut-up face of his. House. And as he fell, his back sliding down the wall until he hit the floor, he was still talking. He was still fucking talking.

There is no worse nightmare than your kid nearly dying. There is no worse feeling than watching your kid die, and being completely helpless to stop it. It was worse than your wife, even, and that was bad enough; that was enough of a nightmare. Pancreatic cancer, that's what killed her. You remember how you spat out those words to that prim, tight-lipped little missy of a doctor, the one who lied to you later; the one that you figured was probably in love with that bastard doctor. Pancreatic cancer – that's what they discovered eventually about your wife, but it took five or six wrong diagnoses and lots of lies and evasions and half-truths. Yes, even doctors lie. And by the time they worked out what it was it was too late to stop.

And then it was Keith fighting for his life. You felt like you were trapped in the same nightmare, all over again. More wrong diagnoses, evasions, half-truths, downright lies. Facts and non-facts, names of diseases and conditions swirling around your head, like a buzz of bees, and you felt – as any father would – that it ought to be your job to sort it out, to work out what's true, what's wrong with him; but that's where you failed as a parent.

You heard gossip in the canteen. The doctor – House – was a drug addict. Addicted to painkillers. He was detoxing, going cold turkey. And nurses were _laughing _about it, for fuck's sake, like it was a joke. A sick joke: your son in the hands of a junkie. It was the kids who did all the work – doctors barely old enough to be out of school, it seemed. They were the ones he sent to lie to you, to cover their asses, to give you half-assed explanations and evasions and half-truths; they were the ones whose job it was to keep you away from him, from that doctor with his stupid stubble and his stupid face and his wrinkled shirts; for God's sake, how can you trust a man who can't even dress himself? Jesus, even his limp was arrogant.

And what was that business with the cat? You remember that moment: Keith's cheerleader tart of a girlfriend pipes up about the cat. Jules. And next thing you know two of the kids are digging up your yard. Meanwhile Keith's liver is tanking, and the doctor's laughing at you, at your questions. And the worst thing is, there is nothing you can do. Absolutely nothing you can do. It's all gone so badly wrong and you can't even move your kid to another hospital, because the move would kill him. Keith is too sick to move, and you don't trust his doctors, and the arrogant jerk who's supposed to be treating him is out of his mind because he's a hopeless junkie cripple.

When the liver came you were so relieved. You'd lost track of whether this would save him, or simply keep him alive; maybe get him healthy enough to move to another hospital, to find a doctor who gives a shit. And then that bastard walked into the surgery and coughed. You couldn't believe it when you heard what he'd done. You saw him standing in the corridor, his shirt all wrinkled and awry and he was talking to those kids, and you couldn't help yourself. That's where you lost it, what little control you had. You swung at him, and your fist connected with his jaw, and you were surprised how hard his jaw-line was. You watched him fall. You'd forgotten in your anger that he was a cripple, but it wouldn't have made any difference. Fuck him. He killed your son and didn't even have the courage to tell you himself.

You watched him fall against the wall and slide down to the floor, a surprised look on his face. The hospital administrator – boss, dean of medicine, whatever – gasped, reached out her hand to him. But he just sat there, sprawled on the floor, almost as if nothing had happened, and he kept on talking.

There was a liver waiting for Keith, and you needed to decide something very quickly, but something about House's face, the way he looked at you, made you listen. He kept on talking. He was trying to say something. He was finally talking to you, properly talking to you for the first time. And then that little skinny prim girl doctor piped up, but you'd stopped trusting her a long time ago. No, it was him you were listening to. It mattered, what he was saying. It mattered enough to keep him talking even as he was sprawled on the floor; even as he stood up again, ignoring the offers of help. This was it, what he was saying. This was the key to it. Something about cats and mothballs and naphthalene, and Keith not eating properly since he'd been in hospital. He believed it. House believed what he was telling you.

And so did you. You gave the liver away. You took a leap of faith, and you're still not entirely sure why or how. How could an arrogant junkie bastard of a doctor who you'd just punched manage to convince you? You flex your hand now, still feeling the impact of that punch. Thank God you hit him. You wouldn't have seen it otherwise; you wouldn't have been watching him. You wouldn't have seen the sincerity. The belief. The honesty of those eyes, shaded in pain, yet still focused on you. The first time someone had told you the truth in days. You recognised truth. That's what it was. He told you the truth, you believed him and he saved your son's life.

Doesn't stop him being a complete bastard, though.


End file.
